suraj.sun writes: Susan Maushart lived out every parent's fantasy: She unplugged her teenagers. For six months, she took away the Internet, TV, iPods, cell phones and video games. The result of what she grandly calls "The Experiment" was more OMG than LOL — and nothing less than an immersion in RL (real life).

As Maushart explains in a book released in the U.S. this week called "The Winter of Our Disconnect", she and her kids rediscovered small pleasures — like board games, books, lazy Sundays, old photos, family meals and listening to music together instead of everyone plugging into their own iPods.

Maushart wrote that her kids "awoke slowly from the state of cognitus interruptus that had characterized many of their waking hours to become more focused logical thinkers." Maushart decided to unplug the family because the kids — ages 14, 15 and 18 when she started The Experiment — didn't just "use media," as she put it. They "inhabited" media. "They don't remember a time before e-mail, or instant messaging, or Google," she wrote

Anti virus companies admit their research teams were ill prepared for Stuxnet and are still coming up to speed on the functioning of Siemens industrial control systems and programmable logic controllers that Stuxnet infected. At the same time, the companies are searching high and low for technical talent with knowledge of the kinds of systems that run power plants, factories and industrial machinery — preparing for a future in which malicious hackers increasingly put critical infrastructure and an Internet of things in the cross hairs.

"We realize we need new knowledge, but not new skills," Symantec's Liam O' Murchu said. "Its not like Stuxnet changes how AV researchers work, but new fields of expertise are needed. This is an area we're not well equipped for."